


Pity the Violins

by apocryphalia



Series: Material Culture [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Museums, Pining, Tapestries, pottery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-12 22:40:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21484000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apocryphalia/pseuds/apocryphalia
Summary: Crowley walked among the familiar objects in their glass cases, fingers aching to reach through and feel the roughness of the tesserae and the spaces between them, to stroke the cool marble and the smooth glass. To make contact with his memories, his history, although he couldn’t do the same for the core of those memories: the angel who was likely, at that moment, sitting in a Soho bookshop 3,456 miles away. (He knew the distance by heart. He had been counting it with every step since he left London.)While on holiday in America with Aziraphale, Crowley remembers a previous trip across the Atlantic.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Material Culture [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1548541
Comments: 15
Kudos: 55





	Pity the Violins

**Author's Note:**

> The modern-day events of this fic overlap with those of [The Setting Suns Are Open](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20727506), but I’ve done my best to make them readable out of order.
> 
> Most of the objects referenced in this are based on specific examples, which I’ve linked in the text if you’re curious about them. (The duck tapestry is also real, and is linked in The Setting Suns Are Open, so I haven’t repeated the link here.)
> 
> On a side note, the titling of this fic hurt my little museum professional soul, but it felt appropriate. I imagine that immortal beings who have literally witnessed all of human history probably have complicated feelings about museums.

_First there's lights out, then there's lock up_  
Masterpieces serving maximum sentences  
It's their own fault for being timeless  
There's a price you pay and a consequence  
All the galleries, the museums  
Here's your ticket, welcome to the tombs  
They're just public mausoleums  
The living dead fill every room  
But the most special are the most lonely  
God, I pity the violins  
In glass coffins they keep coughing  
They've forgotten, forgotten how to sing  
—Regina Spektor, [“All the Rowboats”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CZ8ossU4pc)

** _London, 2020_ **

“America, then?” Crowley did his best to smile warmly over at Aziraphale, although his heart was currently trying to escape through his mouth.

He was prepared for the angel’s protests, prepared to step back, rephrase, and wait for Aziraphale to allow himself to be convinced. They had been dancing that dance for nearly as long as he could remember; he knew all the steps by heart. He was not prepared for Aziraphale to muse that he had never seen the American capital and then inform him that it had not, in fact, been Philadelphia for quite some time. Not even the last time Crowley himself had been there.

_Don’t think about that. This is new, this is different._

They had been dancing their dance for centuries, circling around one another like hungry vultures waiting for the wolves to take their fill. Stepping closer to one another, with a delicate brush of fingertips, soft enough that one had to wonder if it were imaginary. Stepping away, and then back again. Crowley had always been ready to abandon their two-man line dance in favor of a steady waltz, but he had also always known that Aziraphale was not. He was willing to give the angel all the time he needed, and had begun to accept that may have meant all time.

Lately, though, Aziraphale had been stepping away less frequently, and stepping back again faster each time. The circles they walked around each other were becoming tighter and tighter as they settled into their own side. So Crowley had hatched a harebrained plan to take them away on holiday. He had allowed himself to hope that a change of scenery, a little more distance between them and the site of the near-Armageddon, might spur Aziraphale to take another step closer. He had secretly planned for several options—old favorites, places with good food and warm sun—and then he had opened his mouth and babbled something about America. Bloody _America._ And somehow _that_ was what Aziraphale had heard.

"Not quite the same as our history here, it's all so new. Still, it might be interesting, don't you think, my dear?" Aziraphale's voice broke through the haze of Crowley's drunken thoughts, and he suddenly realized he had completely lost track of the beginning of the angel's speech.

"Mmm? Oh, sure, angel," he agreed readily, all the while attempting to trace back the conversation in his mind.

"Are you quite all right, Crowley?"

"'Course, angel. 'M just"—he let out an involuntary yawn as he realized it was true—"getting a bit sleepy."

Aziraphale smiled indulgently as the demon sprawled deeper into the sofa in the back room of the bookshop. "Get some rest, then, dear. I have some reading to do, anyway. We can discuss more tomorrow."

The angel retreated upstairs to his flat, and Crowley passed the night in a feverish, half-drunken haze of dream-like memories.

** _New York City, 1921_ **

Crowley decided to enter the museum on a whim. He had arrived in New York only a few weeks before, looking to cause some trouble with the Americans’ new laws against alcohol. He had quickly found that the illicit liquor trade was not to his taste—all simple bribery and the breaking of legs—but some of the speakeasies were interesting places to be, and there was certainly plenty of temptation to be done.

Now, he found himself walking along Fifth Avenue in something that almost passed for daylight, driven out of his elegant, modern flat on the Upper East Side by sheer boredom and waiting for the city’s seedier elements to make themselves known with the impending sunset. A crack of lightning flashed up ahead and the overcast skies finally opened as Crowley was approaching the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He slipped up the steps and into the museum, surreptitiously miracling the rainwater out of his expensive suit as he passed through the entrance.

He paced through the halls and the galleries, taking in the forced grandeur of his surroundings. All the world’s treasures were on display here, claimed for New York, for America. There was something bittersweet in it, but something comforting, too, about losing himself in the crowds and the quiet corners of the place. It was like walking through a three-dimensional timeline of his own life, loosely laid out over the history of the world. 

Everywhere he walked along the timeline, he couldn’t help but think of Aziraphale, his only constant companion throughout each era when these treasures were new. Aziraphale, who had defied God all the way back at the beginning, simply to keep the humans safe on their journey out of Eden. Aziraphale, who had tempted him to oysters in Rome, who had pilfered scrolls from the Great Library of Alexandria, who had once been a monk (Crowley suspected) purely to get his hands on the world’s knowledge and its most beautiful books. Aziraphale, who had responded to Crowley’s absence for the better part of the last century by learning the _gavotte_, of all things, and _fraternizing_ with that absolute tosser, Oscar Wilde.

And there it was. His ulterior motive for leaving London, seeking out new avenues for temptation, slapped him across the face there in the near-empty corridor. He glared at the only vaguely human thing in close proximity, the painted linen [shroud](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/547334) of a severe Roman woman hanging on the wall before him, and then stalked through the nearest doorway into another gallery.

Crowley now found himself surrounded by ancient mosaics, sculptures, and glassware, struggling to suppress the memory of a night in Rome, some two millennia before. He walked among the familiar objects in their glass cases, fingers aching to reach through and feel the roughness of the tesserae and the spaces between them, to stroke the cool marble and the smooth glass. To make contact with his memories, his history, although he couldn’t do the same for the core of those memories: the angel who was likely, at that moment, sitting in a Soho bookshop 3,456 miles away. (He knew the distance by heart. He had been counting it with every step since he left London.)

He lingered over a display of Greek amphorae, long fingers trailing over the glass that covered them. He had been a potter once, before even these Archaic vases had been formed. Millennia ago, in the desert sands of one of God’s forsaken cities. He could still remember the motions, could almost feel the wet clay under his palms. His mind skipped like a rock over the smooth surface of the memory, then sank as it reached Aziraphale once more.

_“Are_ you _the one responsible for all the sudden piousness around here?”_

_The angel looked away, then looked back again, not quite making eye contact. He shrugged, grimacing somewhere in Crawly’s general direction. “I just thought, perhaps… they needed a bit of a push. Just a little inspiration, that’s all.”_

_“You saved them.” Something tightened in the demon’s chest, a reminder of words he had heard long ago, at the Beginning:_ I gave it away. _"She was going to destroy them, and you stopped Her."_

Crowley stared at the streaks left behind by his fingers, his own distorted reflection in the case covering the amphorae. The dark lenses that covered his serpentine eyes, the black mark marring the space between his jawline and his blood-red hair. His colors were those of death, war, disease, spelling out a warning to those who would dare approach.

He shook his head, watching in the glass as the dim light of this morbid mausoleum reflected off the fire of his hair and his serpent's mark. He watched the bob in his own throat as he swallowed, hard, and turned away in search of a room less laden with the weight of his past.

** _Washington, D.C., 2020_ **

Crowley stalked through the galleries of the Textile Museum, pausing occasionally to examine a particularly interesting tapestry. Most of his attention was trained on Aziraphale, his head carefully tilted to hide his gaze behind his glasses. From across the room, he watched the angel gaze down at a large wall hanging, now laid flat under glass in its temperature-controlled case. His eyes tracked every minute movement of Aziraphale’s face, trying to puzzle out its unreadable expression. A slight frown creased his brow, and the angel’s body hummed with nervous energy. Crowley watched as his fingers knit together, hands twisting in front of him. Although Aziraphale’s eyes looked toward the tapestry in front of him, they were unfocused, unseeing.

This was not the first time Crowley had noticed that distant look in Aziraphale’s eyes since they had arrived in Washington. The angel appeared to be wrestling with something, and Crowley was filled to the brim with hope and fear that his dilemma might be related to Crowley himself.

He dropped his gaze from the angel and stared down at the object closest to him, suddenly struck by its similarity to [another](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/444121) he had seen nearly a century before, the last time he had been in America. Although the [fragment](https://www.doaks.org/resources/textiles/catalogue/BZ.1940.42) before him now was simple, representing merely a basket filled with fruit, it reminded him powerfully of a lonely afternoon spent wandering among the ghosts of his past, and of a painting that had nearly brought him to his knees.

Crowley felt ill at ease here among the relics of early Christianity. He had stumbled across the exhibition while searching the internet for American historical attractions that might be of interest to Aziraphale. He remembered well the angel in Alexandria, his delight in some of the human scholars who were later named heretics. He had hoped that Aziraphale would enjoy revisiting some of those memories, and well, perhaps he was also a bit of a masochist.

Crowley suddenly felt the heat of Aziraphale’s gaze, and he looked up from the odd duck tapestry that had caught his eye a moment earlier. The angel’s plump lips parted and he looked slightly dazed as Crowley caught his eye and offered him a slight smile. The demon was seized with the urge to reach for him, and his long legs started to advance toward Aziraphale before he made a conscious decision to do so. His hands itched to liberate that soft skin from the thick layers of fabric that covered it, almost as they had once itched to free ancient artifacts from their glass prisons. He shoved his treacherous hands into his tight pockets, forcing them to keep to themselves, as he reached the angel and walked his customary circle around him.

“Ready to get out of here, angel?”

** _New York City, 1921_ **

After he fled the Greek and Roman galleries, Crowley found himself wandering among sixteenth and seventeenth-century paintings. French, Italian, and Dutch names stared out at him from the labels on the walls. The demon peered at them curiously. He had left Italy soon after Leonardo’s death in 1519, and most of these works were new to him. Just as he began to relax and enjoy the nearly human experience of discovering foreign masterpieces in the American museum, a seventeenth-century Dutch [still life](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436636?&searchField=All&sortBy=AccessionNumber&ao=on&ft=bacchic&offset=0&rpp=20&pos=1) caught his eye. He stopped short, glaring at the tiny painting and struggling to keep his hands steady, his breathing even.

He had allowed himself to be lulled into a false sense of security among the unfamiliar art, and now he found himself confronted by the most potent possible reminder of the night he had tried so hard not to remember in the Roman galleries. Wine and oysters. _Let me tempt you._ A delicious red stain on the angel's lips, his carefree laughter. It had not been the first time he felt it, but it was the first time his mind formed the words: _I love you._

Crowley's hands clenched into fists in the pockets of his suit jacket. He nearly reached out to rip the offending painting off the wall. Instead, he managed to stop himself and stalked away, down the grand staircase of the museum and back out onto Fifth Avenue. The rain had stopped and night had fallen while he wandered inside the mausoleum of his memories. The demon passed the rest of that night in a drunken haze in one of the rowdier speakeasies. When the sun returned the next morning, he had to be forcibly evicted from the premises, several stolen bottles of subpar Canadian whisky tucked away inside his suit. After he finally stumbled his way back to his flat, he didn’t leave it again for another week.

** _Washington, D.C., 2020_ **

This American holiday had turned out to be quite the whirlwind of emotion, Crowley reflected, beginning early on with their visit to the Textile Museum. Their familiar ritual of wine-fuelled camaraderie later that night had transformed into a memory that would live at the forefront of Crowley’s mind for the rest of eternity: the moment that he heard aloud, from Aziraphale’s lips, the words that had echoed in his own heart and mind for millennia.

The days and nights they had passed together since, arm in arm and in the same bed, had the accidental effect of softening Crowley’s feelings toward both museums and the United States of America. (If he were in the mood to be fully honest with himself, the past few days had actually had the effect of softening Crowley’s feelings toward everything). So it was that he now found himself, on the eve of their departure back home to London, standing in another dimly-lit museum gallery, this time at Dumbarton Oaks. This latest exhibition was the companion to the first one they had seen, displaying early Christian clothing instead of furnishings. In spite of himself, Crowley was rather enjoying it. The many pieces featuring decidedly _non_-Christian imagery brought back fond memories of his own days in the early Byzantine Empire and the ostentatious clothing he had made it a point to manifest.

He glanced up and to his right, catching Aziraphale’s eye and giving his hand a gentle squeeze, savoring the warm weight of it under his own palm. He nodded to the narrow [tunic fragment](https://www.doaks.org/resources/textiles/catalogue/BZ.1948.7) in front of them, which featured a lyre player and a nude dancer.

“Remember these? They were one of mine. Satan, that Jerome really hated them.”

Aziraphale looked over at him with an expression of fond exasperation, a poorly-suppressed smile playing at the corners of his lips. “Well, Jerome was always a bit of a prat anyway.”

“_Angel._ Isn’t he a saint now?” Crowley grinned.

Aziraphale shrugged, his smile turning smug. “Doesn’t mean he wasn’t,” he muttered under his breath.

Crowley threw his head back and laughed, earning them several disapproving glances from the other visitors in the museum. Then he leaned down to kiss his angel, not caring whether any of the humans in the room were watching. “I love you, you absolute _bastard_,” he whispered to Aziraphale. “What do you say to a trip back to the hotel before dinner?”

Aziraphale grinned at him, reaching out for his hand once more. “Let’s go.”

**Author's Note:**

> You can also find me on Tumblr at [@apocryphalia](https://apocryphalia.tumblr.com/). Come say hi!


End file.
